Is ignorance bliss?

What if you heard on the news this morning that said stepping on spiders was the cause of the COVID pandemic and that anyone who has stepped on a spider over the last two or three years was to blame? What would you think?

Many of us, and perhaps all of us, have stepped on a spider either accidentally or on purpose, so we all have that experience.  We also know there is no causal relationship between this act and the pandemic.  So we wouldn’t believe the news because we have the personal experience and knowledge to see the faultiness in its logic.  We wouldn’t be able to help but feel that we’ve been attacked unjustly, and that someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

In the same way, Matthew’s gospel pitted the overmatched Pharisees against Jesus in a battle of wits.  The Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus by getting Him to contradict Himself so that He would lose credibility; or worse yet, to renounce Mosaic Law, which would put Him at odds with His very own disciples (Matthew 19:3-12).  Of course, the issue at hand was not divorce, or even law.  In either case, this would result in a great blow to His ability to minister to the people.

Obviously, Jesus deftly identified these tactics and answered truthfully and without guile; the only way one could get out of this trap, because He is governed by a higher, spiritual law, which rises above the smoke and mirrors that often characterize human law.

As this is a presidential election year, this is an appropriate reading for the beginning of the heavy-duty and unprecedented COVID campaign season.  Anyone who watches any amount of television or uses social media for the next 3 months or so will hear and see a number of attacks between the candidates.  If these campaign ‘ads’ and memes are not the epitome of a Pharisee-style assault, I don’t know what is.

“So what’s the harm in it?” one might ask.  One might also ask what real harm might have been caused by the Pharisees in Matthew’s gospel.  There’s a way to ask questions without really wanting to know the answers, or to ask questions that are more like statements than bona fide questions.  Viewed in this way, we could see the Pharisees’ assault on Jesus as a mockery of the educational process.

So, too, are many of the negative campaign ads a mockery of the educational process.  They’re disguised as ways to inform the public of the issues, but instead they use half-truths and misleading statements to try to persuade the public to vote their candidates’ way.   I acknowledge that both political parties and even the so-called “impartial” press are guilty of this, so this isn’t an endorsement for any one party or candidate.

The ads only work when the audience is not knowledgeable enough about our government and our social issues to see the faultiness in their logic, so that same audience can’t detect the blatant misuse of the media—or worse yet, the collusion of the media—to attempt to sway them towards the sponsor’s political agenda.

The answer to this, of course, is education and common sense.  My opinion is that educating our citizenry, especially our children, will enable most of us to have the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to give us the best chance of choosing the best candidate to run the country, based on the real issues, well into the future.  Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s not a good position from which to choose a president.